The Reticent Storyteller by Barry Rachin (popular books of all time .TXT) 📕

taking Lilly into Boston to celebrate. The girl would probably sleep over his apartment. She texted him a half hour earlier - something about being stuck in traffic and delayed getting home."I'm at a distinct disadvantage," Parker confided.

"How so?"

"What I feel for your daughter far exceeds anything Lilly could ever experience for me." He scrupulously avoided the 'L' word. The first time he told Lilly how he felt she observed, "I'm sure Thelma and Rick loved each other once and now look at them."

"That's pretty damn cynical," he grumbled.

"Words come cheap," she replied harshly. "Treat me nice. That's all that matters."


A half hour later, the front door burst open and Lilly rushed in. "Traffic was awful," she explained, slipping off her jacket and scarf. "I'll just be a moment." She hurried upstairs to change out of her work clothes.

Mrs. Truman led him into the den that doubled as a family library. "Good luck tonight and, for what it's worth, I'd be delighted to welcome you into our family." Hugging him briefly, she left the room.

An avid reader, Lilly's father installed floor-to-ceiling, mahogany shelves along three walls. Once when Parker asked Mrs. Truman, which of the hundreds of books in the library her daughter had read, the woman replied cryptically, "It might be easier to say which Lilly hasn't read."

Parker's future bride didn't so much read books as she devoured them, cannibalized the hardcover classics. As he perused the titles, several authors jumped out him. There was a clever tale about a simple-minded servant with a parrot by Flaubert. Lilly served up the bittersweet story like an hors d’oeuvre before their last debauched lovemaking. And Guy de Maupassant - Parker vaguely recalled a tale about a prostitute who outfoxed a sadistic Nazi officer during the French occupation. On a shelf slightly above eye level he spied Candide. Voltaire, according to Lilly, wrote like a zonked-out hippy from the psychedelic sixties. Or at least that’s how it seemed when she described the main character's hallucinogenic romp across sixteenth-century Europe.

On the far wall was a collection by Willa Cather. Did it contain Neighbor Rosiky? Lilly recounted that brief character sketch between strings in a duckpin bowling alley off route one in North Attleboro. A few rows down Edith Wharton had been misfiled. Parker moved the nineteenth-century socialite to the opposite end of the collection, where she rightfully belonged. George Elliot - her novels ran a thousand pages or more. Lilly Parker ignored Silas Marner in favor of vignettes - some comical, others painfully sad - from each of Elliot's major works. And Turgenev, the Russian…

"I'm ready now." Decked out in the same stunning dress she wore their first date, Lilly floated into the room.

Reaching into his pocket, Parker rubbed a thumb reassuringly over the fuzzy surface of the ring box. "Come in and close the door. There's something I want to show you, darling." Imprint

Publication Date: 11-29-2010

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